Poem
Elisabeth Bletsoe
MELBURY BUBB
MELBURY BUBB
MELBURY BUBB
what belongs to me I keep:my old love
where intimacy creeps
as if to a body buried
in the woods
to become so lost so close to
where I started
encaged among the twigs &
dormant buds
like a great bird;
stridor of trees scouring themselves
into wounds, the
tips of the branches breaking to
forked tongues of flame,
clatrian of sheet-metal foliage as a
cenozoic moon spirals toward
fimbulwinter
into pitch scary black
tallness
trying to pull down the sky
with its iron claws
conjoined we were in this
a boundlessness of
uncut quiet
contained in a single closed
memory-loop,
the polarities of our exchanging thoughts
switching through umbilical corridors;
knowledge of duramen, heartwood
alburnum, sapwood;
abscission of leaf-fall
the tidal flush through xylem bundles,
slow accretions of lignin;
to plant in synodic rhythm,
sidereal frequency
where grubbing roots knot spread matrices of
blood,
bone & gristle
ourselves & all we touched
grown from the one mesoderm,
indivisible tissue;
an act to shake a single webstrand
vibrates the whole:
a lock of hair severed,
a tree felled,
a letter sent
tiny instruments of causes deep in nature
this chalky knoll
“a multi-coloured fortified
place”
flint-warted, gouged & rucked by
centuries of landslip
a hillful of trees thrust up;
writh & rowaty grass in
shades of buff, bistre,
russet, rust & cinnamon
foxfire of deciduous larch &
out of the red the
red dogwood a woodpigeon
heavily
& in all our outdoor days together the
one thing he never spoke of to me
was love
nor I to him
where the antlers of an inverted stag
take root among
ophidian coils
obscured by a sprung
thicket of words
we carved a private alphabet,
residual meanings from
remoter signals of beech & sycamore
“woaks & ellems”;
now you have become your own myth, slipped
between cracks, into the void
the ginnung-gap
myself left sole librarian of the codex of
the scapegoated
the bypassed
the dispossessed
pheasant economies
preserving the land yet
refusing access;
social torpor
a parish adrift in its own dreaming
swayed
by the stale exhalations of privilege, constructing
an ossuary of bird-bones
ash-rind exposing its
geodic core, broken
gate tears at my sleeve;
scrying among the flyspecks &
amber rills
in the base of a cow trough for the
history of things to come
late oak eggar
knocks at my circle of light
set to die for what it craves,
that which is shielded from it,
denied it, would
kill it
if it ever did succeed
caught a falling star &
cut my hands to pieces
a “heroic girl”, an
unspilt vessel of silence
my years of backlogged speech
grown calcareous like a
stone baby
weighting you down
deep & safe in the
grave of my thought
now you are mine & only mine
no other footstep
could form its impress in
the leaf-encumbered chambers of
my heart
in the chill beneath
the trees a mist becomes
particulate, shines
my rough embarkened self
concealed as less than woman
more than human:
earth gripped, this
grief, impacted, is what I have
that is my own &
what belongs to me I keep
Marty South, ‘The Woodlanders’
Bubb Down Hill
© 2007, Elisabeth Bletsoe
Elisabeth Bletsoe
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1960)
“Elisabeth’s poetry is not just highly unusual, it is an anomaly. Although at times it has been generatively linked to new age concerns and at other times to linguistically innovative late modernism, her work is, in the modern context, healthily and excitingly independent. When I first encountered it, her work seemed to be a form of highly-charged symbolism, by which I mean Symbolism as in the ...
Poems
Poems of Elisabeth Bletsoe
Close
MELBURY BUBB
what belongs to me I keep:my old love
where intimacy creeps
as if to a body buried
in the woods
to become so lost so close to
where I started
encaged among the twigs &
dormant buds
like a great bird;
stridor of trees scouring themselves
into wounds, the
tips of the branches breaking to
forked tongues of flame,
clatrian of sheet-metal foliage as a
cenozoic moon spirals toward
fimbulwinter
into pitch scary black
tallness
trying to pull down the sky
with its iron claws
conjoined we were in this
a boundlessness of
uncut quiet
contained in a single closed
memory-loop,
the polarities of our exchanging thoughts
switching through umbilical corridors;
knowledge of duramen, heartwood
alburnum, sapwood;
abscission of leaf-fall
the tidal flush through xylem bundles,
slow accretions of lignin;
to plant in synodic rhythm,
sidereal frequency
where grubbing roots knot spread matrices of
blood,
bone & gristle
ourselves & all we touched
grown from the one mesoderm,
indivisible tissue;
an act to shake a single webstrand
vibrates the whole:
a lock of hair severed,
a tree felled,
a letter sent
tiny instruments of causes deep in nature
this chalky knoll
“a multi-coloured fortified
place”
flint-warted, gouged & rucked by
centuries of landslip
a hillful of trees thrust up;
writh & rowaty grass in
shades of buff, bistre,
russet, rust & cinnamon
foxfire of deciduous larch &
out of the red the
red dogwood a woodpigeon
heavily
& in all our outdoor days together the
one thing he never spoke of to me
was love
nor I to him
where the antlers of an inverted stag
take root among
ophidian coils
obscured by a sprung
thicket of words
we carved a private alphabet,
residual meanings from
remoter signals of beech & sycamore
“woaks & ellems”;
now you have become your own myth, slipped
between cracks, into the void
the ginnung-gap
myself left sole librarian of the codex of
the scapegoated
the bypassed
the dispossessed
pheasant economies
preserving the land yet
refusing access;
social torpor
a parish adrift in its own dreaming
swayed
by the stale exhalations of privilege, constructing
an ossuary of bird-bones
ash-rind exposing its
geodic core, broken
gate tears at my sleeve;
scrying among the flyspecks &
amber rills
in the base of a cow trough for the
history of things to come
late oak eggar
knocks at my circle of light
set to die for what it craves,
that which is shielded from it,
denied it, would
kill it
if it ever did succeed
caught a falling star &
cut my hands to pieces
a “heroic girl”, an
unspilt vessel of silence
my years of backlogged speech
grown calcareous like a
stone baby
weighting you down
deep & safe in the
grave of my thought
now you are mine & only mine
no other footstep
could form its impress in
the leaf-encumbered chambers of
my heart
in the chill beneath
the trees a mist becomes
particulate, shines
my rough embarkened self
concealed as less than woman
more than human:
earth gripped, this
grief, impacted, is what I have
that is my own &
what belongs to me I keep
Marty South, ‘The Woodlanders’
Bubb Down Hill
MELBURY BUBB
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère